Amazon Prime’s Homecoming, which debuted its first season last weekend, is a rare half-hour drama. Created by Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail, it was adapted from a podcast created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg. With relatively sparse source material, the narrower focus allows it to maintain a tight pace; it moves quickly, styled far more cinematically than one might expect.

Hovering between 27 and 33 minutes, each episode focuses on a single plot from the perspective of either one of two characters. Where your typical series diverges with B and C plots, Homecoming alternates between past and present, visually depicting the two timelines with different aspect ratios.

While it’s tempting to label Esmail’s new series as groundbreaking simply for its limited run time, portraying drama in shorter bursts than what network television has groomed us to accept isn’t exactly revolutionary. It’s just usually done with a mix of comedy. Take, for example, Atlanta, Better Things, Casual, Catastrophe, Girls and You’re the Worst. These are all half-hour series that bill themselves as comedies, but as they’ve evolved, stopped going for laughs and zeroed in on the drama. Each of these series found their intellectual footing by focusing on the minutia of real life, spending entire seasons focusing on a single life event or issue rather than each week.

While releasing an entire season all at once isn’t a requirement for half-hours, the rise of streaming has certainly paved the way, offering more flexibility when it comes to exploring different formats. Both Netflix’s Maniac and The OA feel particularly fluid with their sci-fi narratives, because while one episode may be 45 minutes, another could be 24. Time constraints depend not on advertising obligations, but on what the story demands.

Primetime network series like This Is Us, Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Doctor feel corpulent by comparison, as they attempt to pack in as much story as possible while incorporating an entire ensemble of characters — and that’s through 22-episode seasons that feel increasingly redundant. If you take a look at Facebook Watch’s new series Sorry For Your Loss, starring Elizabeth Olsen as a woman who spends each episode attempting to understand her grief after the sudden death of her husband, the tone remains heavy but easier to digest simply because it’s a single narrative. By releasing two episodes per week, it offers viewers more of a healthy snacking session than a binge. Amazon’s Forever straddles the same line, exploring something as heavy as existentialism, but in 30-minute bites that don’t beat you over the head and instead connects its audience so deeply with its characters, you need a reprieve between episodes.

A large cast isn’t impossible either. Transparent, now in its fifth season, follows an entire family, but the series focuses on each member’s thoughts and feelings around one narrative arc rather than suffocating the storyline with multiple obstacles for the ensemble to overcome. You really only need one event, Transparent suggests, one that connects each character and then grants them the space to individually explore it.

While keeping run-times under 30 minutes is still considered a fresh approach to dramatic television, we saw it first way back in 2008 with In Treatment (which Esmail name-checks as an inspiration) and, in addition to Homecoming, the Starz series The Girlfriend Experience continues to keep its own narrative pathos nice and taut.

In whatever capacity, half-an-hour is an easy commitment. However, as streaming services try to produce more bingeable content, the efficiently condensed drama seems especially addictive. It demands attention; one look away and you can miss a key line or scene because time is of the essence. You might think you’re in for a quick bite, but stakes become higher and emotional connections become stronger when the fat and filler are stripped away. It’s difficult to turn away when it’s a single story or character with which you must reckon. And continue to reckon with 30 minutes at a time.